


His Lightnings Scorch Me

by Star_flaming



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Auras, Gen, Mythology References, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Shadwell and Tracy are there in the background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-27 22:17:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19798888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_flaming/pseuds/Star_flaming
Summary: Despite her family being painfully rich, even Anathema is not immune to visas, and has to return to America from time to time, and each return prompts a welcome back party held in Jasmine Cottage, even if the hostess is incredibly jet lagged. On one such occasion, the Them start wondering what Aziraphale and Crowley's auras are like.None of them think very much about what viewing the auras of supernatural beings might do to a person.





	His Lightnings Scorch Me

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Handel's oratorio "Semele"

Summers in Tadfield were no longer picture perfect, but they were still quite fine. Newton had been persuaded to buy Jasmine cottage with help from Anathema, who did not have a visa to stay indefinitely and was required to return to California, at least from time to time. But this was her first day back for this next stint, and so a picnic was held in the garden of Jasmine Cottage to welcome her back, with Shadwell and Tracy and the Them and even Aziraphale and Crowley.

The Them had argued long and hard about if they needed another name for this group, before deciding that the Grown Ups could be Honorary Them, so long as they procured ice cream for their meetings. Aziraphale, gourmand that he was, happily complied. Between Aziraphale’s love of sweets and ice cream, and Crowley’s acquiescence in driving Really Fast, they were absolutely Honorary Them – Shadwell and Tracy had yet to prove themselves beyond the fact that he had been _present_ at the airbase.

At the moment, Anathema, even jetlagged as she was, was telling the Them about auras as they enjoyed the gelato that Aziraphale had brought (pistachio, amarena, and banana, with the obligatory chocolate). Adam’s aura had settled down into a warm golden yellow, while Shadwell’s was a maroon.

“What about Mr. Crowley and Aziraphale? Do they have auras? Or are they like me before?” asked Adam. Anathema blinked a moment and said,

“I don’t know. The Horsepersons didn’t have auras either, but it was different. It was _wrong_ looking at them.”

“That’s because they were personifications of human invention,” said Pepper briskly. “They weren’t living or dead, just created.”

“Actually, wouldn’t an angel be considered _created_ too?” asked Wensleydale. “Does he even have an aura?”

“Mr. Crowley was an angel too, I think, at least at some point,” said Brian, pistachio gelato all down his shirt (and not for lack of trying to avoid it – Aziraphale had promised him high tea at the Ritz if he could go a day without spilling anything on himself (in truth, something of a desperate bargain)). “So he’s probably got the same sort of aura situation as Aziraphale.”

Dog, who was staring very hopefully at the gelato, sneezed, which they all took as some sort of agreement.

“Do you guys want me to try and see?” asked Anathema, who we must remember was jetlagged, and probably wasn’t remembering that this was probably a bad idea.

There was a general chorus of “yes!” and Anathema turned to where the supernatural beings were. Aziraphale was reading aloud, and Newt, who had taken up knitting as a hobby analogous to computer coding’s 1’s and 0’s, was listening as he worked. Crowley was occupying a nearby chair in a manner that could generously be called sitting if one was feeling indulgent, occasionally making Newt drop a stitch so he had to dig for his crochet hook and fix it, usually just after he put the hook away.

“’It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him,’” Aziraphale was reading, “‘and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.’”

It was to Crowley she turned her attention first, and blinked slowly, willing the aura to appear.

It did, and she suddenly regretted it.

Crowley’s aura was beautiful, but beautiful in the way that pictures of deep space were beautiful; it only served to remind one of how very small the earth was, how much was out there and how much emptiness was in between all those things. It felt like when one closed one’s eyes and rubbed at them, watching muted colors bloom and swirl, eyes flicking to catch the shapes and only making them flutter away. It was the deepness of a black hole, bending reality, she thought there was the echo of children crying within it, which should be impossible, auras were visual things, except that there too was a child laughing and begging to be picked up, an infant warm on the clavicle, and there, she could see a silken rope dangling from an executioner’s hand passing through the dark flicking shapes on its way to the prince’s room, but when she tried to follow it she couldn’t.

It looked like the darkness of a cave beneath a desert, cool but fully aware of the heat just outside it, it looked like someone pressing their face against their dead beloved and weeping, it looked like someone looking at the face of their living beloved and aching so sweetly. It looked like all 70 meters of the Bayeux Tapestry spilling out across a polished floor, comets and boats and hawks and the dead laying stripped of armor on the battlefield and so, so beautifully stitched and so, so carefully preserved. It looked like worship, but not in a church, it looked like ritually destroying your offering and throwing it into the sacred canal, like clapping and crying out _Stand up, my master!_ Worship like palm to palm for that’s as close to kissing as you can get, the Sack of Rome burning, burning, burning, but inside a workshop beauty was preserved – angels with wings made of wire without plaster yet applied, touching their cold faces.

There too was a void, a burning void where something _used to be_ and it was filled with such fire, it could overwhelm everything if it wasn’t kept low. Low but hot, hotter than anything natural. It was crawling, clawing, but shoved away, though it hissed cruel things – _and this I’ve said that it may give thee pain –_ in the space between the spurts of laughter from the children. It was buried deep, deep, deep as death deep as the grave that still had its sting here in a demon’s aura.

Mushrooms were living death, and here they grew so well like the space behind the eyes, the caverns of the skull that was void but so needed, but one wasn’t supposed to see one’s _own sinuses_.

She wasn’t supposed to be seeing this, but she didn’t know how to look away.

“My dear?”

The voice broke through, and her head turned, and she regretted that even more.

Aziraphale was before her, and where Crowley’s aura was the invention of light in Total Cave Darkness, Aziraphale’s was the burning afterglow of staring into the very sun.

It was piercing bright like a flaming sword held in a respectful, practiced hand, passed into a hand that never held anything so dangerous because they needed _help._ Nine Spheres in a Rose - _this is the sea to which is moving onward whatsoever it doth create, and all that nature makes_ – she saw warm sunny days, she saw the Rainbow that was both a covenant and a sorrow, she saw gold – so much gold but it wasn’t gold. White, nearly blinding light that could be wrapped into all creation if one but took a piece of it and wished.

She saw the fierce lightning that turned humans to pillars of salt condensed and contained and not used but still very much _there_ , a single rod in a gentle hand brushing open all the bound gates if one but willed, all there and unused and so much love. Love that cried out _Joy from the heaven until the earth!_

Love like the afterglow of light, so very bright but somehow still dark – dark like the richest earth from which all things grew and gained sustenance. A fistful of stardust burning all the colors of creation. A universe glowing golden, a bell that swung forever, striking eternal Love and praise of what is Good – and praise of what is Not Good, of what is Flawed, and yet still so beloved. Fierce, sorrowful Love, Love that took the sun and blotted it out, that shook the ground, that made all creation scream. Love that raged and sorrowed and laughed and _screamed_ and broke death over its knee, took away its fangs and made it nothing more than a starving skeleton that yearned for the power it once had.

But it was closer love, too – nothing so awesome as that primeval Love that once moved over the Water - but just as fine. Looking across a crowd, seeing your beloved and your whole soul perking up as if to say _there you are, my love_ and just basking in being near them. Settling into a routine that never bored, only comforted, the joy of knowing and being known. It was learning to dance with a dear friend patiently showing you how, like holding a book your friend signed for you.

It was piercing bright but soft and Anathema couldn’t look away from that light soft as a down blanket. It was warm, it told her _I know you_ and she wanted to stare into it forever, be _known_ by it, forgo all else and simply stare into the depths of it, all so clear and bright.

It was such a perfect compliment to the light in the dark – it was dark in the light, but she shouldn’t be looking at this as much as with Crowley’s aura. But she had only looked away from that beautiful aura so unlike anything else to look at this one, just as unique.

Suddenly, her gaze was cut off, and she let out a pained noise to suddenly be cut off from such bright beauty, and such dark beauty besides.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you the myth of Semele?” asked a voice by her ear. Crowley.

“Really, my dear, we’re not about to turn her to _ash,_ ” sighed Aziraphale, before patting her arm and saying, “Angels can’t do that, not unless deliberately.”

“Is she going to be okay?” asked Adam from nearby.

“She’ll be fine, Adam, though she might have a migraine.”

“No, she won’t,” dismissed Crowley, and Anathema could _hear_ the pleased smile in Aziraphale’s voice as he thanked Crowley. “Alright, I’m going to uncover your eyes now, do you have the whole aura business set aside?”

“Yes, yes of course,” said Anathema, who promptly remembered to do that. When Crowley’s hands released her, everything was tinged blue, like one’s vision after laying in the sun could be. But no auras surrounded anyone. Her eyes were streaming tears, though. “Looking at your auras was probably a bad idea, wasn’t it?” she asked, glancing between the two.

“Perhaps so,” said Aziraphale, but not unkindly. “You’re lucky I’m only a Principality, if you tried to look at the aura of a _Virtue?_ ” he shook his head, and Anathema had a feeling it would be _really bad_ if she did.

“‘Only a Principality,’” mocked Crowley in the way he did. “Last I checked you’re still technically in charge of the Third Choir.”

“I haven’t been running that since before Eden,” dismissed Aziraphale. “The others handle that now. Nominally I’ve been a contact point for any member of the Choir on earth, though hardly even that anymore.”

Rather desperate to move past _that_ , Anathema said, “I’m going to go sit down now. Um. I probably won’t be a good host the rest of the afternoon.”

“Oh, of course. Go have a seat, I’d suggest sitting in the shade.”

Newt brought her a glass of ice water, and sat with her quietly, which was a blessing, because even without a migraine it wasn’t exactly _pleasant_ to sit in the sun.

After Aziraphale and Crowley explained what had happened to the others, and after Tracy calmed down Shadwell from his crisis of _Anathema-is-a-witch-but-a-good-witch?-and these-two-hurt-her-but-they-didn’t-mean-to-did-she-hurt-herself?-should-he-be trying-to-punish-them-for-hurting-her-or-congratulating-them-on-hurting-a-witch?_ , the Them apologized for asking her to look at their auras.

“I probably should have thought about how dangerous looking at an angel or demon’s aura would be,” said Anathema, who really didn’t want the kids to be too hard on themselves.

“What…what did they look like?” asked Newt, and the Them all perked up at the question, wanting the answers themselves.

“Like…” Anathema paused. How did one even _explain_ it? The Light in the Dark, the Dark in the Light, the Children and the Primeval Waters, the Fire and the Rose? Finally she said, “Like twin stars.” It didn’t capture it at all, but it was the closest she could get.

The afternoon continued on pleasantly, and at some point Crowley silently pressed a pair of sunglasses into Anathema’s hands. Which was _so_ helpful, because even without the migraine the sunlight was uncomfortable. But Anathema knew it wouldn’t do a thing to help if she tried looking at auras again. And she resolved to herself to never _ever_ forget that her friends, even though they were people shaped, were emphatically _not_ human and weren’t beholden to human realities.

(She would forget this a little over a month later, after a late night where more wine than was wise was drunk, and she and Newt were casting about for how they’d host two people overnight when they only had the one bedroom. Aziraphale and Crowley would brush it off and sober themselves up for a drive back to London. Anathema would spend the next hour holding a refilled bottle of wine and whispering, “Can this be used in communion or something now? Is it holy?” Newt would be next to her asking how they could check, but the less that was said about Anathema drunkenly attempting to use her pendulum the better.)

**Author's Note:**

> Aziraphale is reading an excerpt from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Naturally he has two copies, one where the author is yet “Ellis Bell” and the first that bore the name “Emily Brontë.” The excerpt is taken from a section of Catherine talking to Nelly, and it begins thus:  
> “This is nothing,” cried she; “I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy."


End file.
